In times past, garden clubs were thought of as female social clubs, where white gloves, hats and hot tea were the order of the day.
In 2013, meetings are more often about making things grow, caring for the environment and beautifying the community. Tomatoes are as important as rhododendrons, digging and weeding are as much a part of the creative process as floral design, and sharing experiences with a particular variety of plant a more frequent topic than gossip.
And more men are joining up and pitching in, too.
“We’ve got a lot of men,” said Cathleen Fejedelem, a founding member of the Saco Bay Gardening Club. Of the club’s 60 members, she said, about a third are men.
“Garden clubs are among the biggest volunteer organizations in the entire world,” said Kathleen Marty, president of the Garden Club Federation of Maine. In the U.S., she said, there are 6,000 clubs with 198,000 members in National Garden Clubs Inc., of which the Maine group is an affiliate.
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The Maine federation includes 40 clubs with 2,400 members organized in seven regional districts, Marty said. The Stroudwater District includes clubs from Harpswell to Scarborough and west to Bridgton, home of the Lakeside Garden Club.
There are other garden clubs in Maine not affiliated with the federation, Marty said, but she did not have a total number of clubs in the state.
The Saco Bay Gardening Club, founded in 2001, is not part of the federation, according to Fejedelem.
In the beginning, garden club membership was exclusively women.
“When garden clubs were first started, this was the only outlet for women to learn about gardening,” said Linda Frinsko, president of the Gorham Garden Club, which was organized in 1931.
“It was one way that they could learn about gardening,” Frinsko said, “and have some social outlet.”
A history of the Garden Club Federation of Maine shows that at least since 1930, when the federation was created, garden clubs have been actively involved with conservation, community beautification, service and education, and that is perhaps more true today as it was then. That history is at odds with the perception that garden clubs were little more than social organizations for women.
Today, Frinsko said, “More people want to learn about gardening and not so much focus on the social end of it. I think garden clubs are more interested in doing community-type things and encouraging people to grow things.”
Garden clubs give scholarships for the study of horticulture and conservation; plant and maintain gardens for town libraries, museums and historic landmarks; volunteer for “garden therapy” programs at retirement homes and assisted living facilities; and provide books and other learning materials to libraries and schools.
And regular monthly meetings, where non-members are welcome, frequently feature experts who speak on specific topics related to gardening.
Dues for clubs range from $10 to $15 a month. The clubs raise most of their operating funds through annual plant sales and garden tours.
“We do a lot of business (at the plant sale) because the plants we sell are dug from our gardens,” said Elaine Toher, president of the Scarborough Garden Club. “People know that the plants are already acclimated to Maine. We have a really good reputation for our plants. The money we make from this sale is used to supply our operating budget.”
The Scarborough Garden Club plant sale will be held June 1 at the historic Hunnewell House on Black Point Road from 8-11 a.m.
The Scarborough club, founded in 1975, has more than 50 members. Toher said the club was organized to create the gardens around the Hunnewell House, said to be one of the oldest houses in town. The building had been moved to its current site and local gardeners joined together to create the gardens that the club still maintains.
Community service and beautification have long been the mainstay of garden club programs, along with scholarships and donations to schools, and giving money to organizations that promote or maintain natural habitat.
The Scarborough club, for instance, gives a $1,000 scholarship to a Scarborough High School student who completes a college-level course in horticulture or environmental studies, Toher said. The club also donates money to the Friends of Scarborough Marsh, the Scarborough Land Trust and the Scarborough River wildlife sanctuary.
The Saco Bay Gardening Club maintains gardens for the Dyer Library in Saco and the museum next door, as well as the McArthur Library in Biddeford, along with the gardens at the Saco train station, Fejedelem said.
The club also gives five scholarships each year to pay fees for courses at Southern Maine Community College and donates money to help support the gardening program at Saco Middle School.
Fejedelem said the club donates a large number of books to the local libraries, books that focus on gardening in the northeast.
“We really try to concentrate on how to garden in the north, or gardening by the sea,” she said, “where you have a lot of sand maybe … what plants withstand the high winds,” she said.
Marty, of the Garden Club Federation of Maine, concedes, however, that club membership has fallen off, and that perhaps that is due in part to the vast wealth of information about gardening that is available via the Internet.
“The electronic age is impacting how the garden clubs function as compared to how they did 30 years ago or 40 years ago,” Marty said.
The federation maintains a website with pages of information about each of its member clubs. And many clubs host their own websites.
But just reading about gardening is not enough for people like Toher who point to the social aspect of garden clubs that energized membership from the very beginning: People who love to garden enjoy talking about it to people like themselves.
On the one hand, Toher said, she is “fortunate to go to all kinds of workshops, hear speakers, see demonstrations and network with all the other members,” but “the greatest thing about it all,” she said, “is the friendships.”
Rik O’Neal is a freelance writer and filmmaker who lives in Gorham.
Members of the Scarborough Garden Club work on the gardens at the Hunnewell House, which they maintain as part of their community beautification effort. Pictured are, foreground, M.J. Aube and Donna Forest, and from left, Audrey Bell, Pat Biron and Linda Foss.
Members of the Saco Bay Gardening Club of Saco-Biddeford set out plants during their annual plant sale last year.
Jeff O’Donal of O’Donal’s Nursery in Gorham gives a pruning demonstration at a meeting of the Stroudwater District of the Garden Club Federation of Maine. Send questions/comments to the editors.
